Craft Corner: The Millions Interviews Emma Copley Eisenberg

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia was released in January to rave reviews. NPR called it “a masterful work of journalism,” and Melissa del Bosque agreed in her New York Times review: “In the end, The Third Rainbow Girl is not just a masterly examination of a brutal unsolved crime, which leads us through many surprising twists and turns and a final revelation about who the real killer might be. It’s also an unflinching interrogation of what it means to be female in a society marred by misogyny.” It’s a fascinating, dense, and ambitious project that manages to simultaneously work as investigative journalism, true crime, memoir, cultural criticism, and a social history of Appalachia—specifically, Pocahontas County, W.V., where Eisenberg worked after college and where the Rainbow Murders, as they became known, occurred in 1980.

I was excited to talk with Eisenberg and learn how she had approached an undertaking of this size and complexity.

The Millions: Emma, I’ve admired your short fiction for a while, a form with which, in my estimation, you have a great deal of facility. How do you feel your short story/fiction chops informed your work on this project? And, related: as someone best known for, and perhaps most comfortable, working in short fiction, did you have any trepidation about working in the realm of journalism/true crime/creative nonfiction?

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Thanks! I love fiction, particularly short fiction; it’s my first love, my first language. I tried to write this book as fiction at first, but it just didn’t work. I realized pretty quickly that because I’m not from the place where these events took place and where the camera of the book is looking, my imagination would not be able to supply the bone deep details and insights required to tell this story well and truthfully.

In many ways, this book has its roots in genre trouble. I was getting my MFA in fiction at the University of Virginia when I began writing this book and a few things happened around the same time, all in November of 2014. One, I was having a crisis of belief in “fiction”—did it demand a kind of “coherence” that falsely smoothed over and story-ified the bumps of real life? Two, Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus” article came out, throwing UVA’s campus into turmoil. Three, a black student-led protest in response to the failure to indict Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown drew local white supremacy out into the open in Charlottesville. And four, two young women—one white and cis, one black and trans—went missing and were later considered murdered to vastly different community and law enforcement results.

Many of my fellow fiction MFA students seemed to feel these events had nothing to do with them. But I felt I could not go into my room and write from my imagination at that moment. I wanted to participate, in some way, so I opened the door to nonfiction. To be fair, I had also already worked in two alt weekly newsrooms by then, where I had learned the fundamentals of reporting and fact checking. Once the door was opened to nonfiction, what would become The Third Rainbow Girl came tumbling out.

I didn’t think about it as in a particular genre at that point, like journalism or true crime. I just kept letting the sentences pile up. But it quickly became clear that the information I would need to tell this story did not exist on the Internet or in my brain, it lived only with real people and in documents that belonged to real people. Reporting is really just calling people and asking them questions, so I set about doing it. One thing led to another, naturally.

And also: I was absolutely terrified! But most of the terror came later, when I realized and realized again the responsibilities tied to writing nonfiction that we do not attach to fiction, and navigated again and again my positionality as an 85 percent outsider, 15 percent insider to the place. There were a lot of moments of being scared to pick up the phone or send the email, but then I would do it.

I think my fiction training shows up a lot in the book. First of all, I love sentences and playing with language and cramming lowbrow and highbrow words into the same sentence. When I first started writing the book I was writing in “serious nonfiction voice” where I was like “As he perambulated the cobblestone path, an innovative concept appeared in his brain.” I thought that’s what reported nonfiction should sound like. But that’s bad writing! And boring! And then I remembered that I knew how to write sentences and things improved. Also scenes and dialogue. My fiction skills really served me well in taking trial transcript and making it into a scene with human interest and desire.

Once I started working on nonfiction, my fiction improved tremendously; basically all the fiction I’ve published to date was written while I was also writing The Third Rainbow Girl. I think this is because I was trying to tackle big questions of class and race and sexuality in my fiction but it came out clumsy and didactic. Once I had a place to really probe those questions elsewhere, my fiction became so much more fluid, playful, and strange.

TM: Building off that last question, can you talk about the tremendous pressure in writing a book like this, involving a real case with real victims and suspects, to “get the story right” in a sense that doesn’t exist in creating fiction? (In my fiction, I’m personally tremendously unconcerned with factuality and only really care about not being obviously wrong, and reading your book it struck me what a luxury this is.) Did you find this to be the case? And if so, how did it impact the imaginative process?

ECE: Yes, I absolutely felt this pressure, as all writers of nonfiction about real people should. For about the first three years or so of the project I just interviewed, read, wrote, interviewed, read, wrote, listened listened listened. I racked up all this material and felt I was drowning in it. Every time I thought I “had it right,” I would talk to someone new and they would say, “Oh no, that’s not it at all.” Ultimately, right before we sold the book, I realized that was what the book was about—the fact that the story of these crimes and this place have been told so many times and it’s never all the way true. There were two alleged witnesses to the crime who put men in jail with their testimony whose accounts do not include that the other witness was even there. There’s a statement that both suspect and investigator swore the other wrote. Fact itself, storytelling itself, contradiction and multiplicity, these things became the center of my book rather than its periphery, not out of my imagination but because the material and the “truth” demanded that it be so.

That’s one thing I think I learned: that the creative process for fiction and nonfiction is very different. In fiction, there may be (should be) some surprise coming from the elements, the sentences as they are written, but in (good) nonfiction it’s like 100 percent surprise. There are so many things you did not know you didn’t know. Something happens and everything you’ve done up to that point is worthless. It’s very exciting and humbling and woke me up to the hugeness of other people and information and truths I could not ever have created myself.

Then, during the fact-checking process, there were things I found I’d made up or embellished for the sake of scene or coherence as you would in fiction and my wonderful fact checker caught them and I took them out. (Note: nonfiction books are not fact checked by publishers, if you want to be confident everything in your book is factually correct you must hire your own fact checker at your own expense. Because of this, many books are never fact checked). It was interesting to see that my fiction brain could not totally be turned off.

The Millions: One thing that I think is true of almost all full-length books, whether fiction or nonfiction, and regardless of genre, is that they are an exercise in world-building. And part of the challenge of writing a book is figuring out what the boundaries of that world are; or, put another way, I feel like when you understand the boundaries, you often understand the book. The Third Rainbow Girl is such a capacious story, concentric rings of stories, really, that include the crime and investigation, the victims, the suspects, West Virginia, Appalachia, our national history, and your own life—how did you figure out the boundaries of the book?

ECE: Oh dear, indeed! How did I? I really didn’t understand the boundaries for a while, I would say for about three years. As you say it’s a huge story that kept sprawling and my process was very open and organic. My agent, the excellent Jin Auh, read many drafts and refused to take the book out one moment before I knew what it was and for that I am very grateful. I do a little writers festival each May in southern West Virginia in honor of Grace Paley, and in the May of 2017, I sat on this beautiful swath of land near where I used to live there and felt as stuck and mixed up about the book as I ever had. It felt out of control and a mess and I worried it had no story and never would. So I decided to just make a list of everything I knew to be absolutely true, whether it be about the community, the crimes, me in the place, anything. The result was “True Things,” the list that became the book’s prologue, and the thing that convinced my agent the book was ready for sale. That list came to serve as a kind of true north for me, which may be something similar to the boundaries of the project.

The Millions: As mentioned, you include a great deal of your life in this book—it is arguably as much a memoir of your time working for VISTA in West Virginia and living there, as it is true crime. Can you talk a little bit about the way this project presented itself and evolved? To put it simplistically: did it feel like a memoir that started drawing in elements of nonfiction, or nonfiction that started drawing in elements of memoir, or did both sides evolve more or less synchronously in the writing process?

ECE: There are seven parts to the book, my personal story is present in two of them. After I moved away from Pocahontas County, I felt haunted and confused by things I’d done and witnessed and just also super homesick, if you can be homesick for a place you’re not from. It’s the most beautiful place on earth. So there was always some introspective writing, mostly notes towards essays that I was working on in the years 2011 to 2013. But when I began working on the project that would become The Third Rainbow Girl, I thought I was writing a purely reported and researched narrative about Pocahontas County and what became known as “The Rainbow Murders.” But as may be clear by now, I’m not a pure journalist, finding out the answers to factual questions has never been compelling to me, and I knew there were so many aspects to the crimes that would never be fully answered, that could not be fully answered by a purely factual accounting. I felt I needed another element to the book, something that could both offer context to the place where the crimes took place and supply the emotional truth that facts, and particularly legal and law enforcement facts, sometimes lack.

The things I read about the case, the way women in the county got shafted when it came to power and possibility but also were able to survive and connect in much higher numbers than men, and the way some of the men accused of the crimes seemed to carry a particular kind of guilt that seemed to be related amorphously to their bad treatment of women felt familiar, rhymed and resonated with my own experiences as a person living in Pocahontas County. I’d driven that road that used to have a grocery store on it but it was gone now, I’d drank and played music on that mountain where Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed.

Further, it was important to me not to portray Pocahontas County, W.V., as a place from the past, a historical place, a place where only old and bad things happen. People were thriving and working and struggling in contemporary West Virginia and contemporary Appalachia, though their lives are inexorably tied to, and connected by, their particular history. I wanted a way to talk about how West Virginia is actually a way more politically liberal state than Virginia by most measures, and that Pocahontas County has the highest concentration of crazy talented musicians of any place I’ve ever lived, and the trans guy who’d been a student at the nonprofit where I worked and was still making sense of his time there. I also wanted to talk about the Appalachian diaspora, that so many people from Appalachia don’t live there, and that there are also a lot of people like me—not quite from, not quite away—whose experiences don’t fit neatly inside the insider/outsider boxes. To do all this in the most straightforward and honest sense, I eventually realized that I had to include my own experiences in the book.

The Millions: On that note, I think a really interesting thematic aspect of The Third Rainbow Girl is the consideration of queerness vis-à-vis West Virginia (which, as the book points out, has the highest transgender rate in country). Despite an image people might have of macho coal-mining hillbillies, West Virginia is a diverse place, and one that can also be “read” as a very queer place—full of learned codes of behavior and communication, as well as a sense of belonging strongly informed by its existence outside mainstream American culture. I’m interested in other ways that your time in West Virginia and your exploration of this case might have affected your sense of yourself (and vice versa: the ways your evolving sense of personal identity may have affected/informed your view of West Virginia).

ECE: Thanks for this reading, it was important to me that people see that dimension to the state. West Virginia may be the queerest place I’ve lived in some ways, for just these reasons of coded speech and code switching you describe. Appalachian people are queer in this country; they must literally change their ways of speaking and being to be accepted by mainstream America, as a recent episode of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America points out so beautifully.

I came to West Virginia as a very recently out queer person who was very excited and fired up about feminism and queer theory. I often say Pocahontas County rewired my brain, and its true. I learned there about the ways class intersects with queerness and gender and renders most of the theories I learned in classrooms wholly irrelevant. I participated in real and difficult conversations, sexual encounters, and social encounters, and all of them left me questioning and changed. I saw the way that it is so easy to hide in the costume of heterosexuality if you are even a little bit straight and how having that option afforded me love, community, and access that those without it did not have. I saw how complicated the bonds of family and community were, often trumping (pun intended) all supposed political affiliations. Just because you vote for a white supremacist misogynist (which actually not that many West Virginians did, let us recall) doesn’t mean you won’t stick your neck out at a family picnic for your queer child or show up at your biracial cousin’s house when you’re needed. Things are so much more complicated than colors on a map. That insight has stuck with me and influenced my identities in countless ways—not only will I never jump aboard the band wagon of blaming “poor white people” for Trump’s election (The facts do not bear this out!)—but I am also suspicious of any sweeping liberal opinion that demands absolute fealty or belief. If the queers in my neighborhood all believe one thing absolutely, you can count on me to be very suspicious of it and be researching it late at night. Nothing, I have learned, is ever all the way true.

The Millions: I’m always interested in thinking about process. Having successfully written, revised, and brought The Third Rainbow Girl to publication are there things that, if you had to do it again, you would approach differently? Or put another way, if you were to write another nonfiction book, are there lessons from writing this that you feel you could use?

ECE: I’m almost certain I’ll never write another nonfiction book again, or at least not one at all resembling The Third Rainbow Girl. This story was unique, it came into my life when I was very young and held me hostage; writing it has made me into a different person and there will never be another like it.

If I were to write this book again, I’d do two things differently. Firstly, I think I worked very hard and stressed a lot about thinking through my own positionality as a middle-class educated person not from West Virginia who was writing this story, but I perhaps did not interrogate myself enough when it came to being a memoirist. I was so focused on making sure everything in the account was true and ethical and substantively contributed to the larger story I wanted to tell, that I perhaps did not prepare myself for the personal and intimate revelations that memoir often brings.

Secondly, I wish I had known how psychologically grueling a book that deals with this kind of darkness would be on my mind and body. I dreamed about murder—either murdering or being murdered—every night for about two years. At times I was enraged, and at times I was very sad. Meeting other writers who have gone on similar journeys with their books since mine has come out has been incredibly reassuring that this process is okay, even normal for the material. But how I wish I had known that upfront!

The Millions: I like to end these interviews with one incredibly dumb question. Are you a morning, daytime, or nighttime writer?

ECE: Mostly morning, I need to get those good hours where people haven’t sent me too many emails yet and before the anxiety kicks in. But if I’m honest, many of my best ideas and sentences still happen in the night, somewhere between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. There’s a sign I keep by my bed that says “Trust no thought had after 10 p.m.,” which weeds out most of the truly bonkers stuff, but if something gets through during those hours, it’s usually a true keeper.

Aside from being a fellow contributor to The Millions, Sonya Chung is the author of the debut novel, Long for this World, a beautiful book that focuses on the small but complicated negotiations of a family, and larger, global questions of identity, art, and happiness. Sonya and I met for the first time last fall, and I was excited but nervous to read her novel. What if I didn’t like it? To my relief–and joy–I loved it. It’s so gracefully told, and rich–not to mention riveting. Of the book, author Kate Walbert says, “An intricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of lives lived at the crossroads of culture, and a family torn between the old world and the new, Long for This World marks a powerful debut from a young writer of great talent and promise.” I concur. In this interview, Sonya and I discuss her book, the publication process, and what’s it’s really like to go from human to author.

The Millions: I was impressed with how effortlessly you moved from one character’s perspective to another in this book. The choice to give war photographer Jane, the Korean-American daughter of Han Hyun-kyu, her own first-person perspective seemed almost intuitive. Was it? The jacket copy calls your novel a “pointillist triumph”, and that’s accurate: these differences in voice ultimately make up a whole, united story. How did these shifting perspectives come about, and why is Jane the only one who speaks in the “I”?

Sonya Chung: Thanks for your kind words, Edan. And, you are correct: I knew early on that the story would span multiple cultures and settings, and I knew that sections would pivot among points of view. I tend to write without a detailed outline, but I have these intuitive (good word, your word) backdrops that guide and propel me. Polyphony was one of these backdrops. It’s a word/idea that I first grasped as a literary structure (as opposed to a strictly musical term) via Milan Kundera, who was an influence in graduate school; and saw the form modeled in novels like As I Lay Dying, Julia Glass’sThree Junes, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, DeLillo’sUnderworld, Amy Bloom’sLove Invents Us, and many others.

Even with its global canvas, Long for This World is ultimately a family novel; and to me, all families are deeply, radically polyphonic. Jane is a Western character, American born, and of the younger generation; she is also individualistic, relative to her native-Korean counterparts, so it “sounded” right in my ear that she would narrate in a first-person voice (I write very much in an aural way). Conversely, I heard the more traditional Korean characters in third-person, and with a bit of narrative distance (it was almost as if I, the author, was paying these older characters their narrative-distance respect). Ultimately, the collage form provided a way for this multi-layered story to be told compactly, with the shifts in voices/perspectives becoming a part of the story-telling itself.

TM: Although the book only has a few snippets of foreign language, the dialogue often reflects, in English, that the characters are speaking Korean; this is managed by imbuing the speech with a distinct formality. At one point, Han Jae-kyu notes that his brother Han Hyun-kyu–whose been living in America for so long, “seems to have lost, during his years in America, an intuitive sense for the humbled “I”: juh, instead of nah; the manners of apology, overstated in good measure, and self-effacement.” I wonder, did these “manners of apology” influence the actions and destinies of your Korean characters, versus those who have been Americanized? How has moving away from Korea changed Han Hyun-kyu and his wife, Lee Woo-in? As you were writing, did you focus centrally on questions of culture–those behaviors and rituals that are either inherited, learned or discarded?

SC: This question has a bit of the “nature vs nurture” debate in the subtext, I think. My perspective on that is very much both/and, i.e. these characters are at once shaped by culture/circumstance, and also by something essential in each of them. I never conceived of any character as exclusively a metaphor for his cultural experience, but at the same time each character’s backstory does exert a pressure on the present.

For example, the semi-romantic collision between Han Hyun-kyu (who emigrated to the US as a young man) and his sister-in-law Han Jung-joo occurs mostly because the cultural alchemy is just right: they are the same but not the same, Han Hyun-kyu being both native Korean from a small town, and also shaped by Western romanticism. On the other hand, in a scene between Jane and her brother Henry, Jane is trying to better understand their mother— a character who has caused the family grief — by painting her own version of her mother’s childhood, and Henry’s response is, “Shit goes down. People survive. You overdo it with Mom sometimes.” Later, when Jane tries to trace her own struggles back to something in her childhood, the Korean artist Chae Min-suk basically responds with, “That’s too bad.”

I’m fascinated by the fact that individuals raised in basically the same circumstances can evolve so differently; in Long for This World, this is very much the case, and one of the novel’s central concerns is how to manage/understand this randomness, this mysterious sense that some people are strong, some are weak, some people survive, some don’t. Is it culture, family, individual spirit, God, chance, all of the above?

TM: It took me almost two years to write a first draft of my novel, but I feel like I was floundering for the first nine months. I always find it helpful to hear from other young writers how the process was for them. How long did it take you to write your book?

SC: About three and a half years, from when I started to when an agent took me on.

TM: Can you describe for readers how you found your agent? My own search–though it now, thank goodness, has a happy ending–was harrowing.

SC: Finding an agent was tough — a wilderness time, not for the faint of heart. But I basically “followed directions,” did what teachers and writers advised: I made a list of contemporary writers I most admired, flipped to the Acknowledgments pages of their books, and found out who their agents were. I wrote succinct query letters. I followed submissions guidelines. Over a period of several months, I received both form-letter rejections and some very thoughtful, thorough ones. I came very close with three different agents; after the third turned me down, I wallowed and fretted for a few months. Then, miraculously, two friends whom I’d asked to read the manuscript came back with comments — both honest and encouraging. “You’re much closer than you think you are” were the magic words, the refueling I needed to dig in to a final, significant revision. With a new manuscript, I found a champion in Amy Williams — who’s been wonderful, as both agent and friend. In retrospect (that darned 20/20 hindsight), I probably sent the manuscript out too early; in my heart of hearts, I knew it wasn’t ready. But I was impatient and hungry for affirmation, so I flung it out there. I don’t recommend that.

TM: What was it like, once you found your agent, getting published?

SC: Finding a publisher was weirdly fast, given the long road of writing, revising, finding an agent. I met with Amy on a Tuesday, she sent the manuscript out to editors that Thursday, we had an offer on Monday. It took a week for it to sink in, and even then, I don’t think I quite understood just how lucky I was.

TM: Has anything surprised you about the publication process?

SC: Pretty much everything has surprised me. I knew almost nothing about publishing a book, and it’s funny — well, sometimes not so funny — how people in the biz expect that you would. In other words, there’s no Orientation Day for New Writers. I would get these emails referencing “second pass pages” and have no idea what that was; or I’d get a manuscript in the mail with a deadline but wouldn’t know what I was expected to do with it exactly. I was surprised by how long some things took and how quickly other things moved. It became pretty predictable that what I feared would happen didn’t, and what I never saw coming did – maybe kind of like life? I’m glad to have the first book under my belt; next time (assuming there’s a next time), I’ll know a little better.

I was a little surprised by how gut-struck I was when the hardcovers came in. For a first-time author, there is nothing like the hardcover.

TM: How about touring and promoting your book? Do you find that an easy or fulfilling aspect of being a published author?

SC: The social networking aspect of publicity – what most authors are now expected to do – is a mixed bag. It’s wonderful and energizing to connect with other writers and enthusiastic readers in this direct, boundary-less way; but it’s also time-consuming and creates a weird sort of self-consciousness that I’m not sure is conducive to the writing process (Kazuo Ishigurotalked about this in a great interview several years back).

These days, the writer perhaps feels both more control and more responsibility, with regard to how much attention her book gets: if you want to go gangbusters on blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, scheduling your own book tour events, you can do that, and to good effect, but the amount of time/energy you can devote is also endless. If you happen to be a natural networker, it definitely works to your advantage; if, like many writers, you prefer the writing cave, it can be burdensome. There are some days when I realize I could spend 12 hours just exchanging emails and Facebook messages with people who might “open doors” for publicity and events. It’s definitely a choice, and you want to make sure that you’re continuing to choose to write in the midst of all that networking.

With the book tour these days, authors are encouraged to be “lean and mean” and strategic about it. No more 20-city book tours! As for the experience, maybe I’ll start by saying what, for me, it’s not: it’s not exactly “exciting” or “fun.” Those seem to be the two expectations – “Are you excited? Are you having fun?” Primarily, it’s work, which is not a bad thing at all – it’s just distinct from the romanticized notion that it’s glamorous or the pinnacle of dream-fulfillment. I don’t mean to be down on it. It’s absolutely gratifying to meet readers and to hear their good questions or that they’ve been moved by your book; booksellers are a special group of people, and it’s a privilege to connect with them in person; your friends and family roll out endless generosity, support, and hospitality. But book touring is also a lot of scheduling and shuttling and talking talking talking, and also, in a way, performing. After returning from an intense book-events trip a few weeks ago, I sat down to my blog, which I had not updated in several days, and found myself writing, essentially: “Hi everyone. I have nothing to say. I am all talked out.”

TM: I think for debut writers, it’s both exhilarating and slightly scary to have people reading something you worked on for so long. It would be for me. Have the people close to you read your book, and if so, what’s been the reaction?

SC: It’s very strange when your friends and family read your book. After the release date, I started getting emails and Facebook notes – “I’m reading your book!” I thought, “You are?” Promotions had taken up so much space in my head, I forgot that people would actually be reading the thing. Most of my friends and family are not writers, and some aren’t even avid readers; so it’s been gratifying to hear that people like the book, that it seems to have an “all things to all people” quality to it, which surprised me, frankly. I worried that the book might not be that accessible, because it’s complex in structure and perhaps more densely populated than some other novels. A number of people have said they “couldn’t put it down,” that it was a “page-turner.” I love that, because the narrative is fragmented, and I know that agents and editors sometimes shy away from that because of the readability factor.

Of course, not everyone will connect with your work; my expectations were pretty low about this, I know all too well that you can love a person but not love her books (and vice versa). So overall I was pleasantly surprised.

TM: It’s interesting to me that you weren’t considering the readability of your novel, because it is such a page-turner. When I’m writing, I’m (perhaps unhealthily) obsessed with the question of readability, perhaps because I find it’s such a pleasing quality in other people’s books. As you were writing Long for This World, did you imagine for yourself a reader? How did you perceive of their reading experience?

SC: That’s interesting that you think about the reader. Maybe somewhere between you and me is a good, healthy place to land? I did not, and do not, consider the reader when I’m writing. The work is a contained world for me, unto itself, it has its own internal energy and design; and when I sit down to work I’m like the astronaut landing on Planet Novel. I’m worried that this is going to sound pathologically narcissistic, but “the reader” – during early drafts – is me. Going with the astronaut analogy, it’s me who needs to be able to find good air and solid footing and navigate the place while I’m in there.

This does raise challenges later on. For example, I named the characters from inside the astronaut suit. During the editorial process, it became clear that the Korean names were going to be tough for native English-speakers (siblings in a Korean family typically have similar names, e.g. Han Hyun-kyu and Han Jae-kyu). But by then, their names were their names, they weren’t going to change, so we decided to put a character list in front to help readers navigate (I’m also now considering an audio pronunciation guide for my website). I suppose I’ll incorporate that experience as I go forward, but generally speaking I find that, for me, cracking open that door to self-consciousness lets in all kinds of monsters.

TM: It certainly can! I suppose my imagined reader is me–and also not me. I certainly write what I would like to read, but my writing is also for some imaginary person, someone who lives across town, perhaps, and reads in the tub, and in line at the post office, and during breakfast. She has impeccable taste, of course. This lady, she absolutely loved your book!

One comment:

This too is so fantastic!( I just wrote a previous comment)
Thank you for bringing up the fact that working class white people were not the big Trump supporters that people imagine, forgetting that many small-business people also lack college degrees. But thank you also for continuing the theme of complexity instead of Dogma. I’m very grateful for The Millions today

I’d been waiting to read another novel by Lauren Groff ever since I finished her first, The Monsters of Templeton, a genealogy-detective story which also happens to include an enormous lake monster and sentences so beautiful you just want to weep. That promising debut, however, could not prepare me for the brilliance and wisdom of Arcadia, Groff’s recently-released second novel. I was wholly swept up in this story about, among other things, a man who is raised on a commune; I would’ve read it faster were it not for the stunning prose that I wanted, like a fine meal, to savor. Groff’s novel is so richly imagined that every word, every detail, feels true. She is one of the most talented writers working today.

The Millions: I was immediately drawn to Bit as a narrator–he’s sensitive, thoughtful, a keen observer of his surroundings, sweet, and tiny. Can’t get much more loveable than that. (He also seems an antidote to another fictional boy, Kevin, from one of my favorite books, We Need to Talk About Kevin–and I think, as a mother of a son, I needed that!) I really enjoyed being in Bit’s world, his perspective. Was he always the person to tell this story? How do you feel a different member of Arcadia might have altered our perception of it?

Lauren Groff: Bit was always the person to tell the story, even if he didn’t begin as the character he ended up being by the last draft. I started this book when I was pregnant with my first son Beckett; from the beginning, I knew there was going to be a child’s point-of-view in the first part. That said, Bit was at first a girl, primarily because almost every point-of-view character I’ve ever written up to then was female. Then Beck was born, and suddenly the character had to be a boy, and he grew into a fuller life as my son did. This book is equally Bit’s mother’s story–Hannah’s story–and even though she and I are similar in a lot of ways, I found Bit’s perspective to be more interesting, his loss more keen. When Arcadia falls apart, Bit knows nothing of the world beyond, really, and has to go into it as an innocent, which seemed utterly terrifying to me. (As a side-note, I love Lionel Shriver [holy hell!].)

TM: I was impressed with how language of this book shifted, grew more mature, as the book progressed, as Bit aged. Also, there’s almost a groovy rhythm to the prose early on that reflects the lifestyle of the commune. Later on, the prose is far more subdued. Was this intentional, and how did you calibrate the perspective with each section?

LG: It’s hard to say how intentional the shift in language was–I write from the gut a lot. That said, I believe very deeply in the symbiosis of story and mode, that the way that a writer chooses to tell the story has to be at least an equal partner to the story itself. Global things matter–the external architecture of the story, its internal structure, point-of-view, voice, verb tense, authorial distance, things like that. And smaller things matter equally–the use of white space, the length and rhythm of the sentences, the choice of details. When a story I’ve written has failed, it’s because I haven’t found the right way to tell it in either a large way or a small way.

TM: Everyone who’s read this book raves about its prose. It’s gorgeous! When Bit is alone as a child in the dark woods, you write, “There is a sense of gathering, a hand that clenches the center of a stretched cloth and lifts.” Later, Bit describes the unfamiliarity of boxed cookies, how they taste “the way batteries do when licked.” As an adult, he thinks of his students, their “faces cracked with interest.” The images are specific, surprising, beautiful. Can you talk a little about your relationship to sentences and imagery, and how you go about crafting your prose?

LG: Ha. Thanks. The prose that ends up in a finished piece is the product of lots and lots of drafts. I do a preliminary draft of almost everything I write, where I just sprint from the beginning of the story to the end in longhand, and when I’m done, I throw it out without rereading it. This seems wasteful, but it’s actually immensely freeing. By the time I’m done with the first draft, I’ve figured out my structural problems, have a good idea of the characters, and, most importantly, am not so wedded to the words themselves that I can’t fix what’s inherently broken about the piece. When I start again, the nice phrasing or images from the first draft reappear if they’re interesting or important and don’t if they’re not. And then, after a good longhand draft is finished (maybe after three or four re-starts), and I transfer it all to the computer, the second stage of drafting begins, where I print out the manuscript, scribble over it crabbily in red ink, insert changes, and reprint. This goes on for dozens and dozens of drafts. And then there are the trusted reader drafts, the agent drafts, the editor drafts, the copy-editor drafts. Sometimes, I wonder if writing fiction is, at its core, mostly a matter of finding a story or character that’s interesting enough to hold the writer’s interest through all of the painstaking work of revising.

TM: The novel reads episodically, with little moments or scenes broken up by white space. There are parts that feel more episodic than others, and it almost feels like time is passing in flashes, everything blurry but a brief, beautiful moment. This made the book not only highly readable, but it also emphasized the passage of time by giving it a physical dimension on the page. This is a long-winded preamble to asking you how you conceived of time passing in Arcadia. The novel is told in the present-tense, and yet, the latter half of the book is so much about Bit looking backward. How did you wrestle with all the years covered? How does scene-writing change in a book that covers so much time?

LG: Oh, I’m so glad you mentioned time. From the beginning, it was deeply important to my idea of the project of this book. I am in love with the gorgeous, elastic, leaping human brain that shuffles and connects disparate pieces of the world into a coherent story. I wanted the white space, either between the episodes or between the four parts of the book, to carry a lot of the narrative burden. Some people may live lives that are perfectly linear, but mine seems to happen in intense, emotionally-charged spurts, followed by long, fallow periods of relative calm. My impression of history–our collective storytelling–is that it happens in crests and troughs, too. With Arcadia, I wanted to examine time, through Bit, as this intensely personal experience; I also wanted to examine time in its larger historical patterns.

TM: I admit, I’m a bit annoyed that so many reviews of Arcadia give away its plot and structure , which was deeply surprising (and thus pleasurable) to me. So, ***spoiler alert*** to those reading this interview who haven’t read the book! I was shocked when this book moved forward into the future; this suddenly panoramic view of Bit’s whole life reminded me a little of A Visit from the Goon Squad (of which I am a big fan), in its surprising depiction of a future that supplies us with a new understanding of the book’s characters. Did you know you were going to structure Arcadia like this? I kept wondering if an earlier draft was more conventional, plot-wise, more like Room by Emma Donoghue–where the little boy who was born and raised in a shed escapes and in the second half of the book has to interact with this big, scary new world. Why skip ahead to Bit as an adult, now accustomed to the outside world? Were you meaning to shift our expectations of plot and novel structure?

LG: As soon as I figured out what I wanted to write about, I understood that my arc was going to move toward dystopia at the end of the book. The impulse stemmed from my research–a lot of the back-to-the-landers I read about and talked to for Arcadia went from being largely idealistic in the 1960s to being somewhat apocalyptic nowadays; for instance, a number of them ascribe to peak oil theories and practice radical homemaking. (For the record, I don’t think they’re wrong.) I was gobsmacked by the idea that people who were extremely future-thinking in their twenties would become extremely anxious about the future in their sixties. It keyed into a lot of the bleakness I was feeling at the time I envisioned this book, because, in truth, I was (am) afraid for my baby’s future. Also, the real pattern for this book was not just ending at Paradise Lost, but also extending into Paradise Regained; if Bit were going to be given the chance to return home, the stakes in the outside world had to be heightened. And though I deeply love Room, which I let myself read after my final edits, Bit’s trajectory was different because I wanted to explore how Bit carries his parents’ idealism throughout his life and how it changes him.

TM: How much research went into Arcadia? What in the commune is just pure imagination and fantasy, and what did you feel needed to be backed up with historical fact? Where does research fit into your writing process?

LG: I research first and a great deal, and then do a small amount throughout the rest of the writing process, all of which took about four years for this book. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do at the beginning, so I started with just basic texts about utopias and dystopias. I moved on to utopian novels (Butler, Morris, More, Le Guin, Campanella, and on and on), read about actual historical intentional communities. The two that took my breath away were Oneida, in mid-nineteenth-century upstate New York (Mansion House is the inspiration for Arcadia House), and The Farm in 1960s through ’80s Tennessee. I spent a few days at both places. Oneida is now a guest-house, and you can stay with people who still live at The Farm, both of which experiences I recommend heartily. And then I talked to everyone who would talk to me about their experiences in intentional communities. Serendipity was on my side with this project. Even during moments that I wasn’t looking for a story, I stumbled into one. We had a garage sale and someone came up to us who said our house had housed a cult in the 1970s that she’d been a part of. Apparently, they wore pink robes and made the kids sleep in the garage.

TM: And because The Millions is a site about books, I must ask, What’s the last great book you read?

LG: I just read Leela Corman’sUnterzakhn, and can’t say enough lovely things about it. It’s a graphic novel that just came out, set on the Lower East Side in the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s lush and smart and and funny and just beautifully drawn. And I just reread Jami Attenberg’s great new novel called The Middlesteins, which will be published in October. It’s so great-hearted and warm and brilliant. You’ll love it.